Jockeys, trainer, spouses clash after big race

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ARCADIA  Santa Anita is a racetrack and not a ring, a one-mile oval conspicuously short on neutral corners.

But fisticuffs flared between two flyweight jockeys following yesterday’s Santa Anita Derby, and trainer Bob Baffert and his wife aimed boxing-caliber broadsides at both combatants. If competing at close quarters for big stakes is a formula for friction, there was no shortage of it in the equine scrum behind wire-to-wire winner Sidney’s Candy.

Upon dismounting beaten odds-on favorite Lookin At Lucky, Garrett Gomez physically accosted rival Victor Espinoza at the trackside scales and accused him of deliberately running him into the rail aboard Who’s Up.

Bob Baffert then blamed Gomez for a “horrendous” ride, comparing it to an intercepted pass. Later, Jill Baffert confronted Espinoza outside the jockeys’ room and charged him with acting on a malicious grudge.

Espinoza, who won the 2002 Kentucky Derby while riding War Emblem for the Bafferts, came through the conflict with a sheepish smile and repeated assertions of innocence.

“Just things that happen in the race,” Espinoza said, in summary. “Anything can happen. You don’t do things to try to hurt somebody ...

“For me, safety is the most important thing. I don’t want to be in any dangerous situation. I ride safe.”

Though intent can be terribly difficult to prove, the stewards are going to want to look deeper into this dispute. If there is substance to Gomez’s story, Espinoza should be looking, at the least, at a long suspension. If Garrett is embroidering to enhance his alibi, he may be in need of a seminar on slander.

Racing is too dangerous and horses are too delicate for jockeys to be attempting payback at the 5/16ths pole. If there is an escalating problem between these two riders and/or the Bafferts, the grownups need to intercede. Immediately.

“Things happen in races,” Gomez said. “But what happened in this race shouldn’t happen. (Espinoza) looked at me and he dropped in and bounced me off the fence. ... It was about something that happened the other day, and I knew that. And when we (came) back in the jocks’ room, he said it: ‘I told you.’

“It’s just uncalled for. There’s no room for it out there. It’s just kind of a shame that (Lookin At Lucky) didn’t get to perform.”

Gomez said Espinoza was retaliating for a tight squeeze in a recent race on Santa Anita’s hillside turf course, and implied that Espinoza may have targeted Baffert’s best Kentucky Derby prospect because the trainer had recently removed him from Misremembered, winner of the Santa Anita Handicap.

“It’s kind of a double whammy,” Gomez said.

The trainer’s wife adopted a similarly accusatory tone when she encountered Espinoza en route to the jockeys’ room after the seventh race.

“You knew damn well you were out of horse,” she said, angrily. “Why didn’t you come out?”

There was a surreal quality to the scene. Only a few moments before Jill Baffert unloaded, Bob Baffert had approached Espinoza, draped an arm around him, and made a show of trying to defuse the drama in front of reporters.